Obama’s Mrs. Grenvilles

Jesse | Feb 18, 2009

Now that George Bush is really gone and Obama has the reins of power firmly in his hands there remains an interesting question: What will he do about all of the illegal actions that the Bush administration officials perpetrated during their eight years in power? Or, more interestingly, will he do anything at all?

There will certainly be pressure from certain quarters of the Democratic party to investigate some of the more egregious violations of executive power and privilege that Bush and vice-president Dick Cheney foisted upon the U.S. during their reign of terror – strike that – fighting terror but will this pressure gain enough traction amongst the current crop of lawmakers, mostly Democrats, to cause anything to actually happen?

If history serves as a guide, recent history at that, the answer would appear to be no. It must be said, however, that recent history includes only examples of Republicans pardoning Republicans and not members of either party initiating investigations into members of the opposing parties. Ford pardoned Nixon to save the country further turmoil. Reagan pardoned Poindexter, architect of the Iran-contra scandal, for reasons that are still unclear. Bush commuted Scooter Libby’s sentence for reasons unexplained. These are perhaps the most glaring examples but they involve only members of the same party.

What is likely to happen now that there are clearly members of an opposing party – George Bush, Alberto Gonzales, Dick Cheney, all of Bush’s torture enablers, and many others in the government apparatus – who would appear to be culpable of crimes ranging from obstruction of justice to violating a number of articles of the American Constitution. Will these people and their alleged transgressions be investigated and if the evidence points in that direction will they be prosecuted?

The answer, in this writer’s humble opinion, is a resounding no. Why is this seeming miscarriage of justice – to some, anyway – going to take place? Simply because these people, no matter what their behavior, are at the most basic level still part of The Club. And what is The Club? It’s that group of the privileged few, who through whatever means – schooling, family, connections, blind ambition – manage to get to the pinnacle of power in American government. That’s not to say that many are not intelligent and capable but there are many people who are also that but cannot break into the inner circles of power in Washington. The point is that once you are there you are part of a protected group that seems to be above the normal conventions that apply to the rest of us.

Dominick Dunne wrote a fascinating book in 1985 that was inspired by the sensational Woodward murder case in 1955 in which a well-born society figure, William Woodward, was shot by his actress/showgirl wife in a highly publicized incident that was dubbed “the shooting of the century.” The shooting was ruled an accident and Mrs. Woodward was never charged. In Dunne’s book, The Two  Mrs. Grenvilles, a woman from a similar background marries above herself into a blue-blood East coast society family and accidentally, according to her, shoots her husband when she mistakes him in the middle of the night for a prowler, the same as the real Mrs. Woodward.

Everyone will get a free pass and justice will not be served and Obama will show himself to be just the same as everyone else who enters that rarefied air inside the beltway. It will be one of the issues that defines his presidency as much as anything else that he will do in the next four or eight years and in the end no one will care or remember anything about it. But the transgressions that were committed will not have gone away and the precedent that they have set will continue to fester for years to come poisoning future generations just as they have poisoned ours.